Information about my law practice concentrating on advocacy for people with disabilities, seniors and their families. Get to know me not only as a lawyer, but my personal interests, passions and family activities.

Unemployment

March 08, 2013

You must include all unemployment compensation
you received in your total income for the year. You should receive a
Form 1099-G, Certain Government Payments. It will show the amount you
were paid and the amount of any federal income taxes withheld from your
payments.

Types of unemployment benefits include:

Benefits paid by a state or the District of Columbia from the Federal Unemployment Trust Fund

Railroad unemployment compensation benefits

Disability payments from a government program paid as a substitute for unemployment compensation

Trade readjustment allowances under the Trade Act of 1974

Unemployment assistance under the Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act

You must include benefits from regular union dues paid to you as an
unemployed member of a union in your income. However, other rules apply
if you contribute to a special union fund and your contributions are not
deductible. If this applies to you, only include in income the amount
you received from the fund that is more than your contributions.

You can choose to have federal income tax
withheld from your unemployment benefits. You make this choice using
Form W-4V, Voluntary Withholding Request. If you complete the form and
give it to the paying office, they will withhold tax at 10 percent of
your payments. If you choose not to have tax withheld, you may have to
make estimated tax payments throughout the year.

January 15, 2013

Cornell
research found that in 2011, 33.4% of working-age (21-64) people with
disabilities were employed, compared with the 75.6% of people without
disabilities. Moreover, 27.8 % of working-age Americans with
disabilities lived in poverty, compared to 12.4% of those without
disabilities.

These dramatic discrepancies continue to separate
Americans with disabilities from their peers without disabilities. The
relevance of these statistics to the process of developing and
maintaining policies that relate to people with disabilities in the
United States cannot be overstated.

The Disability Status
Reports are produced and funded by the Employment and Disability
Institute at the Cornell University ILR School. This effort originated
as a product of the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on
Disability Demographics and Statistics funded by the U.S. Department of
Education, National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research
(grant No. H133B031111).

January 14, 2013

It used to be that once a lawyer grabbed
the brass ring of partnership at a major firm, lifetime employment was
virtually assured.
But more partners are discovering that those days are over.
As firms grapple with continued lackluster demand for legal services,
some are handing out pink slips to partners who don't boost the firm's
bottom line enough.
"You're only as secure as the amount of money you bring in," says a
partner who during the recession was asked to leave a large national law
firm. He was let go from his subsequent firm last year.
It isn't enough to be a good lawyer, he says. "The job is to make money
for the firm."

Having trimmed junior lawyers and staff
in the years after the economic downturn, some big firms now are fixing a
stern eye on partner performance. The firms are keeping close track of
how much business lawyers bring in and how many hours they bill. Those
with disappointing numbers can have their pay cut or be stripped of
their ownership stakes. Others are simply shown the door. ...

Most law firms don't care to publicize
partner exits. But big U.S. firms do plan to cut partners this year,
according to two recent surveys of law-firm leaders.
About 15% of roughly 120 firms surveyed by Wells Fargo Private Bank's
Legal Specialty Group intend to cut partners in the first quarter,
continuing a three-year trend.
And 55% of the 113 managing partners and firm chairmen who responded to
an American Lawyer magazine poll said they planned to ask between one
and five partners to leave in the coming year. Though that proportion
was roughly steady with the previous year, 5% intended to cut between 11
and 20 partners this year, up from 1.2%.

January 10, 2013

Napa Personnel Systems, a Support Services program, places clients in
jobs throughout Napa Valley. The program, which serves clients with a
wide range of physical and developmental disabilities, receives
referrals and funding from the California Department of Rehabilitation
and the North Bay Regional Center. Napa Personnel Systems currently has
115 clients, 60 of whom have been placed in jobs and 55 who are still
looking for work.

Ernest has been working at the local Whole Foods
since it opened about four years ago. As a disabled adult, she is one
of the lucky ones to have found work.

“For people with
disabilities, employment is always low,” Kahiga said, adding that
roughly 80 percent of disabled adults are unemployed.

January 09, 2013

In my last post I mentioned that I started my company, Opportunity
Works, Inc. because I could not find a staffing company with a focus on
recruiting people with disabilities. This seemed like an obvious part of
the solution to the unemployment of people with disabilities. I knew
that Manpower,
the largest staffing company in the world held Federal Contracts to
focus on this area, but still no company I could find had this component
as part of their normal business operation.

Unfortunately, it did not surprise me to find in this paper the
observation, “While many CRPs (community rehabilitation programs),
across the state of Virginia,
have started to develop these business relationships, they have
excluded staffing companies as a viable business partner”. This is true
in my experiences too. While organizations may work with staffing
companies, it is not a strategy. An issue I have had to deal with
head-on is that the Florida
Division of Vocational Rehabilitation does not have clear allowances
for reimbursement of job support services for people placed on temporary
assignments. Most CRPs I have been in contact with are happy to work
with Opportunity Works. I have had only one tell me outright they will
not let me work with their clients because they do not have a vehicle to
be reimbursed for their efforts if they work with me.

January 08, 2013

The NLRB has repeatedly said that the NLRA’s Section 7, which
protects employees’ rights to officially organize as well as to work
together for their mutual aid and protection, clearly applies when
they’re using a new form of communication to do it. It doesn’t matter if
the employees are unionized or not; Section 7 protects most employees.

“Hispanics United of Buffalo is the third opinion from the NLRB since
September 2012 concerning application of traditional labor laws to
employer regulation of employee use of social media,” wrote Adam Forman
and David King, lawyers with Miller Canfield in Detroit, in a recent blog post.

“Social media has arguably created new issues because of its
widespread use, pervasiveness and the ability for anyone to access
content or communications twenty-four hours a day,” Forman tells
Lawyers.com.

“According to the Board, by stating concerns about the workplace and
soliciting co-workers’ views, the employees were taking the first step
towards taking group action to defend themselves against their
co-worker’s accusation that they were not doing enough at work,” Forman
says. “Where an employee’s social media communications are about wages,
hours or working conditions and have the clear ‘mutual aid’ objective,
the communications are protected.”

December 18, 2012

Our workplaces have grown diverse, but jobs remain far too scarce
when it comes to people with autism or other intellectual disabilities.
Unemployment rates vary depending on the study but hover around 80
percent, and people with disabilities who do get jobs are routinely paid
less than other workers. A stigma surrounds people with disabilities,
and employers fear that accommodating workers from this demographic
might be cost-prohibitive.

Fortunately, some progress is being made.

Walgreen
Co., for example, has for years welcomed workers with intellectual
disabilities. In 2007, it opened a distribution center in Anderson,
S.C., with the goal that people with disabilities would make up 33
percent of the staff and be paid and treated the same as any other
employee.

That number now tops 40 percent, and the company opened a
similar center in Connecticut in 2009. It also has begun a separate
program that recruits people with disabilities to work in Walgreen stores.

November 27, 2012

Unemployment is a problem for people from all walks of life, but
that’s especially true for those with disabilities. A new campaign in
Manitowoc County called Jobs First! is seeking to close that employment
gap.

The idea is to change employers’
perceptions of hiring people with disabilities “and at the same time
raising the expectation on our students,” said David Koenig, Next Step
UW and transition coordinator for the Manitowoc Public School District.
Next Step UW is a program for 18- to 21-year-olds with developmental
disabilities that is housed at the University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc.

“We’re
trying to provide more training opportunities for these students that
are tied directly into employers’ expectations,” Koenig said.

November 20, 2012

Now that Campaign 2012 is quickly becoming a distant memory -- and as
the effort to build bridges after a hotly-contested race intensifies in
Washington and across our great nation -- here's something that we can
all agree is an important problem that we can all help solve:
unemployment for veterans with disabilities.

Every American has a role to play. Every community has a job to do in
this all out effort to help this highly skilled, virtually untapped,
human resource -- veterans of the best military force in the world --
secure good, competitive careers. We all can help these injured heroes
become independent, productive tax payers, and help them reach their
full potential.

How can we tackle this problem?

Paralyzed Veterans of America does it through our Mission: ABLE campaign. The jobs piece of that is called PAVE, Paving Access for Veterans Employment--
which involves all sectors in finding a sustainable solution to
unemployment. Through PAVE, we connect directly with injured veterans at
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spinal cord injury centers. Our
growing network of career counselors across the nation work with these
awesome potential employees every step of the way in that journey back
to the work force.

November 16, 2012

Interstate Distributor Company will pay $4.85 million and provide other
significant relief to settle a nationwide class disability
discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC), the agency announced today. The EEOC's suit said the
nationwide trucking firm unlawfully denied reasonable accommodations to
hundreds of employees and fired them pursuant to Interstate's maximum
leave policy.

According to the EEOC's suit, under the challenged
leave policy, if an employee needed more than 12 weeks of leave,
Interstate automatically terminated them rather than determining if it
would be reasonable to provide additional leave as an accommodation. The
EEOC also charged that Interstate violated federal law by refusing to
make exceptions to its "no restrictions" policy. Under this policy, if
an employee had restrictions, Interstate refused to allow them to return
to work and failed to determine if there were reasonable accommodations
that would allow the employee to return to work with restrictions.